


Aeon

by countcarmine



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Character(s), Alien Invasion, Character Study, Gen, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Prequel, i legit do not know what else to tag this with i'm sorry, reverse horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:13:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25560112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/countcarmine/pseuds/countcarmine
Summary: Aeon:1) an indefinitely long period of time2) "timeless" "forever" "eternity"3) (gnosticism) one of the emmanations from the Divine that fell to Earth
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	Aeon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Harbinger has arrived

_O Dark Harbinger of the Heavens_

_We curse you and your descendants_

_May the People* learn from our failings_

_May you and yours never enter the Promised Land_

_Until Gaia returns to Her home_

_You shall never know peace_

_*Editor’s note: “Cetra” has several meanings. The literal term means “traveler”, but the more common, colloquial meaning is “kin” or “the people”._

At the beginning of what is now known as the Common Era, or the beginning of the Cetra decline, a meteorite crashed into the northern continent of the Planet.

The area wasn’t as devoid of life back then as it is today, but even then, there was only one major settlement in the area. The cold and ice in the Northern Crater area today is unnatural, never melting despite not being anywhere near a natural polar ice cap. They say the ice was due to magic, but who’s magic and why was lost to time, as were the different warnings in the area, set up by the Ancients themselves.

“This place should be shunned and abandoned.”

“Honor does not dwell here.”

And so on.

Most of the meteorite burned away before impact, but the impact itself was hard and deep, burying it deep into the earth and flinging tons of debris into the air. Very few Cetra were in the closest main settlement at the time, but all of them felt it. Even the smallest tremors could be felt continents away, and minutes afterward the current started to shift, drifting up to the north. Up north, the sky even turned blood red, from all the debris in the air. It was like that for at least a month afterward

It was such an ominous sign. Everything from the Heavens had that unknowable air about it, until they started recording the march of the stars and other planets. Even eclipses, which were always harrowing, could be predicted with some accuracy, if one knew what to look for. But this…with such a deep wound in Gaia, it felt like it would be fatal. The younger generation thought so, anyway. Word traveled fast in trade networks, and many hunters and trappers had business with their cousins, the ones who decided to stop their pilgrimage and settle in one place. Why they did this, no one could remember, but their merchants had good materials and crops like wheat and rice, and their cities were more akin to fortresses, so it never hurt to do business with them.

After the incident, even when the younger Cetra went about their business because _someone_ had to, it was still quite a shock to enter a city and see the Others hiding in their brick and mortar homes. They thought the whole world was coming to an end, which worried the younger ones, who didn’t have as much life experience as their elders did. It was a deep wound, but Gaia had suffered worse and survived. Even if other extinctions have gone before them, Gaia had healed and continued to live on. That was simply the way of things. It was said that the Others had grown cowardly, for they could no longer hear Gaia and be told this simple fact.

Perhaps that was true, but even then, the ones who traded with the Others never even thought about heading up north to retrieve what had to be very valuable star metal. In fact, despite the Lifestream converging into that one spot, most living things ran away from what became known as the North Crater. They wouldn’t touch it. Not even grass would grow near.

In the North Crater, from the heat of reentry and the sudden convergence of spirit energy, something strange happened.

The meteorite, mostly burned up and oddly brittle for a piece of space rock, cracked open. Not like an egg, but just a small hairline crack that went all up and along the sides.

A thick, black ooze dribbled out and down the sides, onto what was fast becoming a large concentration of spirit energy. The longer it stayed in that convergence, the more it twitched and roiled, until one could maybe, with much hesitation, say that it “woke up”.

Yes, it was alive and awake, although “alive” could only describe it in the loosest of terms. It would have to acquire much more genetic material to do the things that most truly alive things did, but it was awake and aware, after being locked in that rock for an untold amount of years. It spread itself out further, if only to absorb more of that energy. Experiences, memories. After minutes passed, it collected enough memories and thought patterns to spark a rough pastiche of conscious thought, which it needed. This planet had intelligent life, so it needed to work smarter in order to gain a new host body.

One’s luck always varied when taking over a planetary body. It knew this because its hive imprinted all its experiences with its own takeover into its body, and that hive’s home world imprinted _its_ experiences, and on and on back, down to their real home world. None of them were named because they never needed one.

Most planets were dead, or they at least _looked_ dead, but they always had some spirit energy locked away, a spark of life that could be fed on. It was incredibly easy to take that over, since all you had to do was burrow or seep far enough into the ground to find it, but the tradeoff was no new genetic material. That wasn’t needed for reproduction or anything, but it took the “fun” out of a takeover. It was adaptive, in order to mimic and trick other life forms, but gaining different abilities could let you do so many things. The most disappointing outcome would be landing on a planet that had life, but it only got to barely above single-celled organisms. All that work, and for what? To do what it already could but slower and worse? The idea of such a scenario made the thing want to yawn, and it couldn’t even do that yet.

But _this_ place…this had all kinds of life, with all kinds of abilities. Wings and gills and claws…oh, and eyes. The concept of sight was second-hand at that point, but the thought of gaining eyes made it gurgle in excitement. Oh, to be covered in eyes and absorb all that light! To taste nectar with one’s feet and hands. To pick objects up and make something new with them, all by itself!

It was all decorative, a means to an end, but the thought of flight, and swimming with the currents, and magic was too much for its tiny, viscous body. It spread its main body out again and, while it was very tempting to stay in this energy convergence for another thousand years, it had work to do. Much work.

As its biomass increased, it expanded its senses to see where it was. There were many senses that most living things had but never even thought twice about, and the sense of place in an area was one of them. It bonded with the ground and felt for anything out of the ordinary. Some walled area…a _very_ high walled area, much higher than the impact should have been. It must have fallen into some kind of cavern.

Where there were caves, there was liquid. It knew that already, but what kind of liquid was it? Water was the universal solvent, but some planets had ammonia, or nitrogen. Only one way to find out, wasn’t there?

Once it was sufficiently “full”, it ambled along the ground, feeling for something. It took hours, although it wasn’t bothered by such a trivial thing. It could have felt along the ground for days until it felt what it was looking for: the rushing vibrations of a river, in a cave underneath. Perfect.

Releasing all the tension in its body, it seeped into the ground, into the next cave, and dripped from a stalactite into the river below. There were fish here, but genetic extraction would have to wait until the current slowed down, so its body could collect itself again. Molecular analysis confirmed that this was water, which had a high probability of being the case, but it could still be filed under a nice surprise.

It took in the cool feeling of the water swirling around it, and the sensation of eddying in the current, rising and falling, while it thought about the future. Before it went dormant from the cold, it thought about having fins and gills. And eyes. And so much more.

**Author's Note:**

> So Carrion is a really neat game, isn't it? Just a fun fact for everyone that I really like that game, apropos to nothing in this fic, at all.
> 
> Anyway, it's one of these stories. It might have been done to death before, but I wanted to take a crack at it myself and at least get this part out of my system. It's short right now, but there's more to come after I finish everything else.
> 
> If you can or want to, please leave a comment and let me know how I'm doing, although there isn't much right now.


End file.
